The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, like millions of American voters, was revved up on Wednesday morning. He viewed the election result as a call for change -- in his case, a call for structural change to the way we elect the president.

"You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: 'HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!'" he wrote on Facebook. "The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don't. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he's president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we'll continue to have presidents we didn't elect and didn't want."

He might be right. Before 2000, the U.S. had gone 112 years without electing a presidential candidate who had failed to win the popular vote. But thanks to the dwindling number of "swing states" over the past few decades, it's now happened twice in five elections.

The country's 538 Electoral College electors, chosen from the 50 states and the District of Columbia, actually choose the president, not the millions of Americans who go to the polls and cast ballots. This deliberate quirk in the system, which elevates the influence of more rural states with smaller populations, was the Founding Fathers' check on the mindless passions of the majority. Here's how The New York Times puts it: "[I]n an era that predated mass media and even political parties, they were concerned that average Americans would lack enough information about the candidates to make intelligent choices. So informed 'electors' would stand in for them."

The original intention, however, didn't last long. Tradition has ended up dictating that electors vote however their state's people voted. When one doesn't do so -- and that's incredibly rare and typically results in a fine -- he or she is called a "faithless elector."

Some desperate Democrats are now calling for a wave of faithless electors, insisting the 538 Chosen Ones must save the country from a President Trump. A citizens' petition on the White House website declares it is "incumbent on the present electors to remedy this existential imperilment to the Republic, moreover the planet, by choosing to elect Hillary R. Clinton to the Office of the President of the United States or any other such qualified candidate for that Office."

It's not going to happen. As of Thursday morning, the petition has barely more than 9,000 signatures. No electors from Republican states have declared they won't vote for Trump. (Before the election, a couple of Washington state electors said they might refuse to vote for Clinton if she won the state, which she did. "No, no, no on Hillary. Absolutely not. No way," said one of then, Robert Satiacum, a Bernie Sanders supporter.)